Like all forms of discrimination, racist discourse is especially powerful when conveyed
in sophisticated rituals that make it appear commonsensical. The latter are often
produced by persons sincere in their rejection of racism and hence involve successful
denial thereof. Couched in symbolism attributing positive qualities to racialized
groups, these forms stem from benevolent racism (with parallels in benevolent sexism)
― as opposed to hostile racism, where open stigmatization of the outgroup is allowed
or even encouraged. Using discourse analysis of migration-related reporting in the
Hungarian press in the mid-2010s, the focus of this study is the racialization of
Muslims in coverage that is openly critical of anti-Muslim rhetoric. Benchmarking
benevolent racist framing against the hostile variant, I outline the various workarounds
deployed, probably unwittingly, by promoters of the former to uphold building blocks
of the latter ― most significantly the idea that Muslims constitute a threat to Western
civilization. In the process, I take stock of the shifts in meaning that nominally
invariant phraseology undergoes between (a) distant points in time (e.g., the adjective
"Judeo-Christian", originating in anti-Semitic rhetoric but currently mostly used
to signal commitment to antiracism) and (b) when deployed with regard to, respectively,
Muslims, Christians, and Jews.
